Working for a living

Now that I’m a couple of months into my new job I guess I can talk a little about it.  Kelly & I drop Hopscotch off at daycare and then catch the train for a short 10-15 minute ride in to the city.

My job here is with a national governemnt ministry, so similar to my job in the States with the National Park Service, although my roles are a bit different. But there are quite a few differences here:

• The office layout is much different. Our ministry has been in temporary offices since the earthquake back in November and when they moved they decided to try out a new arrangement where there are no assigned work spaces.  In my old office everyone had their own cubicle or office off of a common hallway.  My new office has clusters of 4 work spaces separated by a low divider that you can just see over when sitting. And most differently, work spaces aren’t assigned.  So when you come in in the morning you choose where you want to sit for the day. It also means that the office tends to be much noisier than my old one which was fairly quiet most of the time.
• The work culture is quite different as well. There is a big emphasis on personal and career development and its common for people to do secondments (what we would call a detail in NPS) to another role for a few weeks, months or even longer. It seems like there is a lot of interaction between different parts of the ministry as well, and if you want to spend a little time working with another team, as long as you get what you need to get done, it’s generally ok.
• It’s a much more diverse workforce.  There is a pretty even mix between early, mid and late career people, and it’s very international. So far I’ve met people from NZ & Australia of course, but also US, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Finland, Fiji, and the Philppines.
• The office is also much more social. It’s pretty common to pop out for coffee in the morning, or for a walk, or go out for drinks after work. In fact, in the introductory materials, there is a list of things you should accomplish on your first day of work and one of them is to learn where you can go for a good cup of coffee.

Now some or most of these differences might just be because of the location of the office. My old office was out in the burbs, so you couldn’t walk out the door with your workmates to a coffee shop. But whatever the reason, between the open layout and different work culture it’s definitely a different feel.